Talking Biz News has a memo from Dow Jones & Co. president Todd Larsen, outlining how employees will be organised in its corporate restructuring, with five separate business groups – separating Wall Street Journal print and digital:

There is lots to pull out here, but key were his comments on pay walls – he doesn’t believe it makes commercial or professional sense:

[C]harging might be right for some bits of the Murdoch stable of media properties, but is it right for all bits of his empire, or for everyone else? Isn’t there, in any case, more to be learned at this stage of the revolution, by different people trying different models – maybe different models within their own businesses – than all stampeding to one model?

(…)

As an editor, I worry about how a universal pay wall would change the way we do our journalism. We have taken 10 or more years to learn how to tell stories in different media – ie not simply text and still pictures. Some stories are told most effectively by a combination of print and web. That’s how we now plan our journalism. As my colleague Emily Bell is fond of saying we want it to be linked in with the web – be “of the web”, not simply be on the web.

Darren Parkin is, at 37, one of the youngest editors in the history of the Coventry Telegraph. But he is determined not to be the last captain of this mini-flagship of the Trinity Mirror empire whose alumni include Jeremy Vine of the BBC and Dermot Murnaghan of Sky News.

Parkin took over the Telegraph ship in a storm last November. He was the third in a year and the third to come and address the Midland’s major media forum – the Coventry Conversations at Coventry University. He attracted a packed house last Friday.

Fortunately for him, he is of a cheery disposition and refused to be downhearted by the task of turning round rapidly declining advertising, declining sales and fewer journalists. He advised the (student) journalists manqué too not be downhearted at the state of the industry either.

They had to learn that they were entering a rapidly changing industry and one in which multi-platform skills were at a premium. It was adapt or die, in his view. But the core journalistic skills of finding, researching and writing were still vital even if complemented by the newer web based ones.

Parkin announced the launch of a unique internship scheme brokered with Coventry’s Journalism department. Four desks in the Telegraph newsroom will be set aside for Cov university students to be interns three days a week. Seven had already applied. As for his plans for the paper, Parkin said he was planning some fireworks for the Telegraph website with “one of two things that will make other newspapers very jealous”.

He hoped these would be available later in the year but refused, despite being pressed, to give any more detail. As for local news partnerships, he was willing to join in with the likes of BBC Coventry and Warwickshire and did not regard the broadcaster as an enemy “as at least one of my predecessors did”.

The Telegraph like other local papers, he said, needed to reconnect to the audience and do that through any platforms available. He would be encouraging his journalists to once more become active members and the scribes of their community.

Parkin started his career as a Youth Training Scheme intern on the Dewsbury Reporter 20 years ago, paid a pittance by the state. Since he has been Young Journalist of the year three times, a chief reporter on the Solihull Times and at 24, Britain’s youngest editor – of the Wolverhampton News.

Since 2005, he had been editor in chief of the well-regarded weeklies division of Coventry Newspapers. He will need all this experience if he is to guide the good ship Coventry Telegraph away from the rocks of media failure and on to a bright future – or any future.

For this 5Across video feature, Mark Glasier gathered a group of experts to examine the environmental impact of print media, e-waste and the energy used by web servers:

Most surprisingly, I learned that newspaperpublishers use mostly recycled paper, as well as “virgin paper” that comes from the refuse generated by saw mills when creating lumber for houses. Could it be that over time newspapers are actually the greener option versus using electronic devices? No one knows for sure yet, but it’s a fascinating question to ponder.

Rob Campbell reports on the AJE conference on journalism education and entrepreneurship:

Meet Danny, Jack and James, of Little White Lies , Bad Idea , and London-Se1. They are young journalism entrepreneurs, who recently shared their thoughts with journalism lecturers at the January seminar of the AJE . Delegates also heard about Goldsmith College’s East London Lines start-up, and about the way students are working with a hyperlocal news site in Newcastle. And the icing on the cake (more icing later) was a skype chat with Jeff Jarvis speaking from his desk at CUNY.

Alfred Hermida asks if there’s any point in labelling ‘new media’ as a separate category. “The problem with new media is that it a generational definition. New media is ‘new’ to my generation and beyond. The internet didn’t exist when I went to university 20 years ago. We barely had computers,” he writes.